Are you as disappointed in Obama as I am?

(The title is supposed to be sarcastic. I’m not sure that’s coming through.)

Gosh, the administration started with such high hopes. Elect him, Obama promised, and we would get the following:

I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on Earth.

That’s pretty basic. Let’s see how the promises stack up.

“We began to provide care for the sick.” Obama did push his health care reform through Congress. The results to date? This year, we finally got to see a decrease in the number of uninsured. Before you start celebrating, though, a majority of those were unemployed young people who got to hang onto their parents’ coverage. The rest — they got more government coverage:

But for most other age groups, the numbers largely reflected the continuation of a long-running shift away from private insurance toward government coverage — with Medicare and Medicaid picking up much of the slack left by the steady erosion of employment-based insurance.

Socialized medicine here we come. Is this a good thing? I don’t know. I do know that, in my family, when my parents and my sister started being blinded by cataracts, they were immediately lined up for outpatient surgery, almost all of which their insurance covered. In England, under government medicine, those blinded by cataracts aren’t so lucky:

Thousands of elderly people are having to put up with deteriorating sight because they are denied cataract surgery on the NHS by ‘cruel and random’ rationing, campaigners warn.

Some health trusts offer the procedure only to patients whose sight is so poor it has led to them having a fall, research has found.

Nearly half of health trusts ration operations, with many turning patients away unless they can no longer drive, read or recognise their friends.

Obama can also boast that insurance premiums increased by only 4% this year, a historically low number. The problem, though, is that most peoples’ wages increased by, at best, only 2%. In other words, under ObamaCare, the rise in insurance costs vastly outpaces the rise in people’s income. So, if my math is correct, if one considers the ratio of insurance payments to actual wealth, people paid significantly more under ObamaCare.

I’d therefore characterize caring for the sick as a broken promise because, barring those young ‘uns sponging off their parents’ insurers, everyone else is getting less or paying more — or both.

Oh, and about those unemployed young people and underpaid American workers…. Obama definitely promised that his presidency would mean that the government would provide “good jobs to the jobless.” Hmm. Let’s see how that worked out.

Obama made an even grander promise than employment. He guaranteed that his presidency would mark the moment when “the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.” Okay, I don’t know how the fugue to measure this promise. I do know that Mother Nature has been doing her usual spectacular show of earthquakes, volcanoes, droughts, floods, etc. I’m pretty sure the oceans have been holding steady. This is an impossible promise to quantify but, given the droughts, earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, etc., I’d say that, for Obama, this was a massive fail.

The last of Obama’s promises had to do with national security. His presidency, said, would mark the moment “we ended a war and secured our nation.” Yeah. We did pull out of Iraq, but that was on the timetable Bush started. Take away Iraq (which is blowing up) and things don’t look so good.

We’re still in Afghanistan, and we’re losing more young Americans than ever to a war the president is prosecuting in a half-assed manner. By the way, the link I just gave opens with a lede sentence that is a perfect example of the liberal inability to match cause and effect: “The number of American casualties in war-torn Afghanistan continues to rise despite plans of the withdrawal of US troops, Press TV reports.” I dunno. Could it be that the number of casualties is rising, not despite plans to withdraw, but because of those plans? Just asking, you know….

Obama also added more wars to the plate, sending drones into Pakistan and sucking us into supporting Libyan rebels for reasons Obama was never able to enunciate. Regarding Libya, let’s ask Ambassador Chris Stevens how that worked out. Oh, I’m sorry, my bad. I had an Obama moment and saw dead people. Poor Chris Stevens was horribly murdered by those same Libyan rebels, may his soul rest in peace.

And about that “secure nation” stuff that wrapped up the Obama promise series. Keeping in mind that an American embassy, no matter where it is in the world, is American soil, I don’t think we’re very secure at the moment. This Daily Mail article has a staggering photographic run down of American soil under aggressive attack all over the Middle East (except Israel, of course). We are in a crisis posture. God Bless our Marines, because they’re being sent in to sort out this crisis, and they really need our prayers.

The media is working overtime to shill for Obama and hide his record, but my Facebook account says that even the most stalwart liberals (which is how I would identify almost all the people who live in my corporeal, as opposed to cyber, world), while unable emotionally to blame Obama directly, aren’t buying the gauzy Potemkin Village the media is trying to create.

I have to go back to my low-paying underemployment now, but I’ll leave you with a heart-warming video:

Not the least bit disappointed, no. I didn’t have any expectations from what everybody with a brain knew right out front was a nothing. Disappointment would imply there was somehow an unmet expectation, and I never had any.

But I’ll agree with Robert Arvanitis: it is a bit disconcerting to find that the whole damn edifice of the country that’s was 232 years a-building turns out to be so fragile, and built on sand so shifty that three and half years can, with almost insolent ease, turn the whole thing to offal. That’s a little tough to swallow. I thought this was a fairly robust structure we had here, pretty secure in its institutions. Wrong-o!

Charles Martel

jj, the structure was pretty sound but the caretakers have been neglecting it for so long that it’s reaching its material limits.

Think of a 100-story skyscraper. To construct it took an immense amount of foresight and labor. The finished work is a magnificent tower. But it has to be vigilantly maintained. The seals that keep the windows from admitting moisture and weather have to be constantly inspected. The same with the elevator motors and cables, and the workers hired to clean the toilets, mop the floors, and empty the trash cans have to show up on time and put in honest hours.

The security guards have to be honest and unbribable, and not look the other way when people damage the property or shouldn’t be in the building in the first place. The building owners must prudently set aside rent money to pay for maintenance and insurance, and not let the money be used for superfluous or self-serving purposes.

Imagine the United States as that magnificent building, only it has been neglected for years by a majority of the people who work there. The window gaskets have been rotting, water is leaking into the structure in a thousand different places, the guards are taking bribes to let suspicious characters roam about at will, and the building owners are unilaterally voiding or violating heretofore ironclad leases and rental agreements. The building’s inspectors–the press–have surrendered the will or ability to tell the truth because the owners’ cognac and connections are so enticing.

The difference now is that everything that was once behind the scenes is now nakedly in the open. The ruin has been a long time coming, but Obama is simply the mask ripped off. The criminals and parasites that have always seen the United States as a sucker’s game, a thing to be pillaged, raped, and reviled, like any contemptible victim, now operate with impunity. All the systems and checks put in place so long ago have been bypassed or allowed to rust.

SADIE

No shock, no awe, no surprises with one small caveat – the Federal Reserve opened the flood gate on QE3 and there is no mechanism to close the gates. We will be Bengladesh during the monsoon season – it’s only a matter of time. I emailed a family friend (I am sure I’ve mentioned it before when we’ve discussed monetary policy). Friend, manages high end portfolios and foundations – not mine (((sigh)))and asked about the Titantic a/k/a QE3. Below an edited comment:Can you believe the continued debasement of the dollar?

Mark my words it is going to end badly and the very people they are seeking to help are going to be ones hurt the most. The poverty level has increased and the black unemployment is a staggering 28% of the black population. Incredible. I think what the Fed did today will not help a whit with the economy or with the unemployment. It helps the Banks.

skullbuster

When people asked me what I thought of the canditate for POTUS Obama, I told them that he was like Ahmadinejad. If he did what he said he was going to do we were in deep trouble. The only thing I am having a problem with now is I cannot bring myself to admit that all this was previously planned by him and his people.

SADIE

“….planned by him and his people.”

I’d say the plan was put in to motion following the results of the 2000 election. Introductions were made at the 2004 DNC and everything else is history.

Caped Crusader

Got exactly what I expected…………unfortunately for America.

Mike Devx

It is worse than I expected it to be.

I knew about the socialism and the “investments” in America’s future and the desire to “transform our country”. I knew about our America Pravda press and how dishonest they would be.

I did not expect Czars. I did not expect Executive Orders up the wazoo. You know the cartoons where the dog is leaning back against a closet door that looks as though its about to *burst*. The dog is saying, “Don’t touch the door! Don’t touch the door!” You touch the door. The next comic frame is shows an open closet door and the frame is filled iwth thousands of dog bones. That’s Obama and Executive Orders.

cxI did not expect him to so brazenly violate the law, and then sneeringly say, “stop me if you can. I will do whatever I like, whatever pleases me, and I don’t give damn about the law.”

I did not expect a Dictator-Thug wanna-be, a President who actually and truly wished he was a dictator because then it would be so much easier. Just didn’t expect it.

IF you had told me in 2008 everything that this president would do, I would expect his approval ratings to be at about 13%. Instead he is close to 50%, and that crushes me. I had a much higher impression of the Ameerican People. I’m not disappointed in Obama. I’m disappointed in Us.

“The number of American casualties in war-torn Afghanistan continues to rise despite plans of the withdrawal of US troops, Press TV reports.”

This is an example of what The Wall Street Journal columnist James Taranto calls the ‘Fox Butterfield Fallacy’, after the New York Times reporter who famously asked why more people were sent to prison, even as crime rates were falling. Liberalism is all about feeling; not so much about thinking.

SADIE

“Just didn’t expect it. It is worse than I expected.”

Mike, I like the way you express your dismay and outrage. I’d like to see our elected conservatives make your feelings pale by comparison – but they haven’t and they don’t! In fact, what I’ve observed is that they have responded to Obama’s grab-bag of tricks with a yawn. What we read, see, hear are the obvious, but the conservatives have access [read: connections] to the less than visible. We should have seen and heard Col. Allen West at the RNC – did we. HELL NO. And why not? And why have the most out-spoken been ignored? Kinda makes me wonder.

SADIE,
Point of order: that’s LTC West, and my experience with Army officers leads me to believe that he would (politely) correct you. Yes, I know that LTC is spoken as ‘colonel’.

NJ Governor Chris Christie did speak, and he is no shrinking violet. Still, I agree with your assessment that Mr. West would have been a welcome addition to the RNC.

SADIE

bkivey I stand corrected, although I am sitting at the moment. Thanks.

94Corvette

I don’t see Obama as a Chauncey Gardner figure at all. He knows what his goal are, he knows what he is doing and he knows what to say to entice his followers to do his bidding. When I think of Obama, I think of the serpent in the garden lying to Eve about the apple –

“Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?”
2 The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden,but God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.’”
4 “You will not certainly die,” the serpent said to the woman.“For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God,knowing good and evil.”
The promises he makes sound wonderful, but the consequences of our following him are deadly.

Always had trouble with the Genesis story. A little further on (3:22) God says “Behold, the man is become as one of us.” Two questions: (A) who’s he talking to? and: (B) who is “us?” However, all of that’s another story.

I don’t think Obama’s particularly bright: for all we know he was last in his class in every class he was ever in. Obviously there were no white-shoe law firms lined up to sign him on for a truckload of money when he graduated. Who gets a JD from Harvard and goes to work as a “community organizer?” You know perfectly well if he was at the top of his class – anywhere, any class – those transcripts would be out there for all the world to see, and for the press to brag about. They wouldn’t be sequestered. GREs and LSATs are both acceptable proxies for admission to MENSA, and if he did well enough for that, and qualified as a member he’d be one – and you know we’d know it. He loves himself far too much not to brag – if he has any reason. Real or imagined. Maybe there’d still be some people still alive if he could have refrained from telling the world – over and over and over – what a tough guy he is, killing bin Laden and all. Keep on spiking the football, eventually Islam calls a penalty.

This is a guy who’s gone through life voting “present.” If he has any actual abilities he hasn’t shown them, at least where I could see them. He certainly is not a great speaker, take him off the teleprompter and he’s the village idiot. Even his so-called signature legislation, he didn’t build that. (He’s just one of the many who hasn’t read it.) It’s much more proper to call it “Pelosicare,” because she’s the dingbat who wrote it – which explains with perfect clarity why it’s such a pork-laden mess. He wasn’t smart enough to figure out how to sell it, either – which is why it passed the only way it could have: in a democrat-dominated congress. That may be evidence of many things, mostly about democrats – but it’s hard to see where any of them equates to brains on his part.

Now, maybe it’s smart of him to – in his own mind – avoid all responsibility. On fiscal matters, Larry Summers has been quoted as remarking to the rest of the team that “we’re on our own out here (on this limb), there’s no adult in charge.” This sounds minimally smart to me, but then, I’m a cynic. It also sounds childish. If he thinks he can avoid responsibility by having Pelosi write healthcare, Summers, Bernanke and Geithner screw up the economy, and the Clinton idiot (not the rapist, the other one) louse up relations with practically every country on the planet, he’s sadly mistaken before the bar of history. (It’s the Obama administration, knothead, and while it may strike your tiny rat brain as really bright to have other people out front so they can get blamed and nothing’s your fault, it’s still the Obama administration. Pop quiz, bozo: name Herbert Hoover’s Secretary of the Treasury.)

I don’t think he’s smart at all, and as the world explodes around us because of the startling level of ineptitude he and Madame Fat-Ass, Secretary of State display, I begin to conclude he’s not only not very smart, he’s outright dumb. “Not very smart” would be a step up from he is, in foreign policy terms. Like most mopes, he’s surrounded himself with “advisers” who apparently know less than he does, and it’s coming back to bite a sizable proportion of the earth’s surface. Where it ends, he hasn’t a clue.

And the really sad thing is, he’s not even clever enough to pretend he genuinely cares. Those overnight private numbers day before yesterday must have scared the hell out of him, to get him off the campaigning/fundraising trail yesterday and back to Andrews. Though note how careful he was to make sure Madame was present, and working overtime to sell the party line that free speech is somehow at fault.

At least that is, I suppose I have to grant, evidence of intelligence. Of a rudimentary sort, anyway. Rodents do eventually learn to stop eating the poison.

Gringo

Four years ago I said that Obama, like Julius Wintergreen in the Gershwin musical Of Thee I Sing, was running on a platform of LOVE. His Hope and Change spiel was just a spiel. His getting Alice Palmer and others off the ballot in his initial campaign in the 1996 Democratic Party primary for an Illinois state legislative seat was an example of old-style hardball politics, not the hopey changey politics that Obama claimed to personify.

I figured that Obama would be a disaster in foreign policy, based on his 2007 proposal to cut the Surge off at its knees and commence troop withdrawal in Iraq ASAP. I am not surprised at what has recently transpired in the Middle East.
I was hoping he wouldn’t be as bad as I feared a pal of Bill Ayers would be.http://assistantvillageidiot.blogspot.com/2008/01/obama.html